“Winter Light” has four stanzas with four lines in each. Dr. Eiseley’s words spoke to me last week, and yet even more now, following the presidential election.
A spider web pulled tight between two stones
With nothing left but autumn leaves to catch
Is maybe a winter sign, or the thin blue bones
Of a hare picked clean by ants. A man can attach
Meanings enough to the wind when his luck is out
But, having stumbled into this season of grief,
I mean to reflect on the life that is here and about
In the fall of the leaves—not on the dying leaf.
Something more tough, reliable, and stark
Carries the blood of life toward a farther spring—
Something that lies concealed in the soundless dark
Of burr and pod, in the seeds that hook and sting.
I have learned from these that love which endures the night
May smolder in outward death while the colors blaze,
But trust my love—it is small, burr-coated, and tight.
It will stick to the bone. It will last through the autumn days.
In contrast to this poem, please note that on November 6th, the day after the election, I saw this when I first opened my computer.
STEP INTO THE VIRTUAL AREA OF DIGITAL GAMEPLAY, AN ELECTRIFYING WORLD WHERE LEGENDS ARE BORN.
And at the bottom of the page?
IT’S NATIONAL NACHOS DAY.
Then beside my computer, I found in an old journal the following words:
The value of having an inner map of the world as it is (not as it’s broadcast) is this: it allows you to know that your task is larger than yourself. If you choose, just by virtue of being a decent person, you are entrusted with passing on something of value through a dark, crazy time—preserving your integrity, in your way, by your acts and your very breathing for those who will build when the chaos exhausts itself. Persons who assume the burden of their own integrity are free—because integrity is freedom, and its force can’t be quelled. The future lives in our individual, often lonely, and certainly unprofitable acts of integrity, or it doesn’t live at all.
Next week: Wherever that inner voice takes me.
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